fairchild

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

fairchild

Ruby and Postgres Regular Expression Syntaxes

Ruby's regular expressions are unusually powerful. Postgres' regular expressions are not as powerful, but they come close; close enough that it's possible to do many pattern-based queries and string transformations entirely in a query.

And sometimes, it's very useful to have a single regular expression that works

fairchild

#!/bin/bash

# FIXME:
# WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.9.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.8.0

NOKOGIRIR_VERSION=${1:-1.6.1}
LIBXML_VERSION=${2:-2.9.1}
LIBXSLT_VERSION=${3:-1.1.28}

gem uninstall nokogiri libxml-ruby

fairchild

# installs elasticsearch on ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10
wget http://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.20.1.deb
sudo dpkg -i elasticsearch-0.20.1.deb

fairchild

#!/usr/bin/ruby                                                                 
require 'net/http'                                                              
                                                                              

META_BASE = "/2008-02-01/meta-data"                                            

def server
  @server ||= Net::HTTP.new("169.254.169.254")                                  
end
                                                                                

fairchild

cd ~
sudo apt-get install unzip
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties -y
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin -y

wget https://github.com/downloads/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-0.18.7.tar.gz -O elasticsearch.tar.gz

tar -xf elasticsearch.tar.gz

fairchild

begin
  require 'ruport'
rescue LoadError => err
  warn "Couldn't load ruport gem: #{err}"
end

namespace :import do
  desc 'Import tickets from CSV File'
  task :csv => :environment do

fairchild

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# lib/etherpad.rb
#
# mechanize => 1.0.0
%w{rubygems nokogiri mechanize json logger}.each {|l| require l }

class Etherpad
  def initialize(base_url, username, password)
    @@base_url = base_url
    @@username = username

fairchild

#!/bin/sh
if [ $# != 5 ]; then
  echo "Utility for setting up NAT forwarding to VBox guests"
  echo "Usage: $0 GUEST SERVICE PROTOCOL GUESTPORT HOSTPORT"
  echo "E.g. $0 \"Linux Guest\" guestssh TCP 22 2222"
  echo "NOTE: Port forwarding will only affect stopped VMs"
  exit 1
fi

guest=$1

fairchild

install
url --url http://10.15.0.50/centos/5/os/x86_64/
lang en_US.UTF-8
rootpw --iscrypted $1$Hi/9xDlZ$nrLa2780lRFXv4QPEK./I0
firewall --disabled
authconfig --enableshadow --enablemd5
selinux --permissive
timezone America/Los_Angeles
bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=xvda --append="console=xvc0"
clearpart --all --initlabel